Malti explained young children can experience an empathic guilt for making another child cry, or for violating their own standards of right and wrong, and “those two reactions can be entirely independent, or can go together.”

Children generally develop beyond the simplistic version of guilt by age 6, when it becomes more about transgressions.

Helen Egger, chairman of the department of child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU Langone Health, told Klass guilt stems from “theory of mind” and it’s closely tied to a child’s empathy for others.

Egger said “children have to have developed a theory of mind, self and others, to be able to feel guilt." On the other side, "when you have lying or lack of guilt, the child seems to have a reduced capacity for empathy,” she said.

Klass contends “guilt is part of children’s normal development, and we don’t actually want to see children grow up without it, but we also worry that they may judge themselves too harshly, or feel responsible for things that are well beyond their powers (the classic one would be the child who blames himself for his parents fighting, or even divorcing).”

Egger, Malti, and others highlighted the links between dysfunctional forms of guilt and depression and anxiety, and offered ways adults can identify and correct children to ensure they put their relationships and behavior in proper perspective.

The researchers highlight the natural and productive role of guilt to help youngsters internalize the values of society, a process that James Davison Hunter, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, discusses in broader context in TheTragedy of Moral Education in America.

In a critique of contemporary moral culture, Hunter writes, “. . . in the attempt to avoid the language of good and evil, the word guilt is effectively banished from this new vocabulary. People certainly feel guilty, but no one is actually guilty. Because we understand the mental and social causes of behavior, we know that wrongdoers are troubled, not guilty, and need therapy, not punishment. The goodness innate in them has not been properly brought out . . .”

“Using this lesson along with the documentary (‘Nuremburg Remembered’) will introduce teachers and their students to the essential questions of guilt, judgment and responsibility that were initially posed at the end of World War II and continue to be raised in the twenty-first century,” according to the Facing History site.

Sign up today for our free weekly email newsletter and we'll send you a free chapter of your choice from James Davison Hunter and Ryan S. Olson's book The Content of Their Character! Pick your free chapter below.